The concept of miasma has, as an ideological construct, spread like a kind of miasma itself, playing a crucial and problematic role in the realms of moral psychology, medical theory, and, fascist ideology. The Oxford English Dictionary currently defines “miasma” as “noxious vapour rising from putrescent organic matter, marshland, etc., which pollutes the atmosphere,” but this definition is much more material than its early, morally and spiritually tinged usages. In Ancient Greece, it was thought to be a semi-invisible pollution, a stain of bad luck attracted by bad behavior—a kind of bad karma that could potentially be inherited. In his research, E. R. Doods notes, “There is no trace in Homer that pollution [miasma] was either infectious or hereditary. In the archaic view it was both, and therein lie its terror” (36). This growing terror around a vague conception of moral pollution correlated with the desire for personal cleansing, or purification (catharsis), shifting “the notion of purity from the magical to the moral sphere” (Doods 35-7). The “undeniable growth of anxiety and dread in the evolution of Greek religion” circulated via “horror stories of blood-guilt,” which was central to the general shift from a shame culture to guilt culture (Doods 44). However, while Doods elucidates how miasma provided an Archaic Greek with a “natural explanation” for and “concrete form” to feelings of personal guilt (48), it also naturalized and concretized undesirable circumstances as inherently deserved. From the “moral sphere” to individuals and, by extension, to lineages and families, these developments culturally engendered a spiritual and moral explanation for the disenfranchisement of certain communities, naturalizing less fortunate positions in society. It was so natural, in fact, that Plato’s Laws had to condemn “an animal, or even an inanimate object” (Laws 873e) if either were involved in the death of a person, banishing the accused animal or object from the city (223). “Pollution is incurred,” he explains further in an endnote, “in all cases of homicide, even involuntary (865cd), or suicide (873d).

Despite the intermixing of moral/spiritual and material origins, the more widely known understanding of miasma is in its more physical form as a centuries-long theory in medicine, particularly its association with the spread of malaria. In “Miasma, Malaria, and Method,” Jeanne Guillemin notes how a growth in population density correlated with the miasmatic spread of malaria, and how “outbreaks of malaria, cholera, and fevers in general were attributed to the miasma from open sewers, slaughterhouse offal, dumps, graveyards, and generally stench-filled areas where the poor lived” (246). Here, we see the OED definition of “noxious vapour” from decaying “organic matter” tethered to certain areas and the communities that inhabit them. What’s more, the Archaic Greek cultural roots of the term carry with it the potential that this area and these people justly inherited the “bad luck” of these diseases. We see the medical use of miasma in Marchamont Nedham’s 1665 Medela medicinæ, a manifesto-like plea to improve conceptions of medicine. Marchamont explicitly links the Greek conception of miasma to a kind of “Ferment” that “being received into the Body, changeth it wholly, and alters it by qualification like to it self,” so it completely changes the constitution of its victims to induce various diseases (115). The victims of miasma are, at least materially, at most essentially, something other than what they originally were.

In the Early Modern era, however, miasma was more than a contagion theory: its olfactory features took on metaphorical and social implications, portending its later appropriation into fascist ideology. “Olfactory prejudice,” attributing certain smells to the Other or the masses, was fairly prevalent in Early Modern England (Pannell, 68), running alongside miasma’s circulation as a medicinal theory. I’m reminded also of John Marston’s works on Antonio and Mellida. In Antonio’s Revenge, he writes of the “stench of flesh” that taints the air with “human putrefaction’s noisome scent,” a kind of “pollution that should be purged” (2.1.71-2). Marston also complained of the “stench of garlic” in the crowds of commoners that attended less sophisticated venues (Gurr, 38). Smells, diseases, and pollution were all associated with lower class masses and foreigners. Indeed, this association is central to Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of fascism: the active threat of revolutionary “masses,” similar to the overflowing “waves of miasma,” are associated with any “formless mass,” “floods” or “filth” (4) and are thus something to be contained, controlled, or, In Marston’s words, “purged.” One tactic of the fascist leader, according to Theweleit, is to offer the masses a kind of nourishing order and structure, else “They would perish, flowing out and around as miasma,” and thus be something to eliminate instead. The agent of this fascistic violence, the “soldier male,” strives to differentiate himself from the undifferentiated “bloody miasma,” to preserve a notion of the self, through a “direct onslaught on femininity” (279). Thus, miasma, as a quasi-tangible form of both spiritual and airborne pollution in Classical and Renaissance culture, lays the groundwork for a kind of conceptual framework for fascist constructions of order and purity at war with formless, dehumanized, infectious masses.

The aversion to “flesh” and dead matter implicit in these various cultural understandings of miasma reflects a kind of resistance to the fact of embodiment itself, to facts of materiality. Rising from the graves of ancient Greek cemeteries, circulating the standing area of The Globe, and imposed on the Other, miasma in a way reminds one of the fact of material finitude and of our fundamental connection to other human and non-human beings. Of course, air pollution exists and we ought to be sensitive to the health of the environment, but we should also be careful to notice the ways in which notions of pollution are ideologically weaponized against marginalized communities.

 

Works Cited

Doods, E.R.. The Greeks and the Irrational, University of California Press, 1951.

Guillemin, Jeanne. “Miasma, malaria, and method.” Molecular Interventions 1.5 (2001): 246.

Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Nedham, Marchamont. Medela Medicinæ: A Plea for the Free Prosestion and Renovation of the Art of Physick, Out of the Noblest and Most Authentick Writers … : Tending to the Rescue of Mankind from the Tyranny of Diseases, and of Physicians Themselves, from the Pedansism of Old Authors and Present Dictators. London: Printed for Richard Lownds, 1665. Internet resource.

Pannell, Lindsay. “Viperous Breathings: The Miasma Theory in Early Modern England,” http://hdl.handle.net/11310/103, 2020.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies: Vol. 2 Male Bodies Psychoanalyzing the White Terror